Hanoi and a sideways picture

I'm in Hanoi, sports fans. For those of you with maps of China/Vietnam on hand, follow this sequence:
Chengdu (Sichuan) to Kunming (Yunnan) by plane (1 hour)
Kunming to Hekou by sleeper bus (12 hours, overnight)
Hekou to LaoCai by 10-minute shuttle (10 minutes)
LaoCai to Hanoi by hard-seat train (10-11 hours)

Despite several annoyances, small and large, I made it to Hanoi by the seat of my pants and the skin of my teeth (eww, teeth-skin) quicker than I expected.

I missed my plane on Thursday night. Cons: I slept on the cold airport floor that night. Pros: I paid nothing for the ticket change and I learned a valuable lesson about how hard it is to find a taxi to the airport during Chinese Spring Festival.

I arrived in Kunming hours before the Vietnamese consulate was about to close for a week (Spring Festival stikes again) but convinced them to give me visa that same day. In 5 minutes. And I only had to pay double! Oh wait... that's a lot. Note to self: "next time try not to pay double."

After consulate-party-time I took an overnight sleeper bus to the sleepy border town of HeKou. that trip can be summed up as "violent". A regular bus has passengers sitting near the floor. A sleeper bus has them stacked lengthwise on rickety bunks up to the ceiling. So as we lurched violently (there's that word again) on the dirt road with dim headlights in the dark, let's just say I was scared like a little scaredy-baby contemplating his crib rolling over into a rocky ravine.

Then came the border crossing, no sweat, then came the train to Hanoi. Trains where you can stick your head out thewindow are the best. I met some Chinese travellers and some German travellers on the bus. Everybody spoke a little English, but more often stuck to either Chinese or German, so I was stuck in the middle a little.

Hanoi is beautiful. I don't know whether I've exceeded my self-imposed 300-word limit yet, but I probably have, so I'll just say: I'm going to Ho Chi Minh city tonight. And: Vietnamese is harder to learn than Chinese. Totally. Or I'm an idiot. And "Hello, picture of the catholic church in Hanoi? Could you not be sideways?"

Ciao to my players and haters (I love you all)
Matthew

Pandas and Poo!

I won't post for a little while, not out of laziness now, but because I'm trying to get out of Chengdu and visit Hanoi (the capital of Vietnam, for our geographically-challenged readers) before my vacation is over (February 20th). Also, I have to go a little earlier than planned because I'm clearing out tonight and crashing at Douglas' place until I go, due to the "rat problem" at my place. I know, eww, whatever. It's being taken care of. I went rat-hunting (non-lethal) last night, and discovered one of their nests in our heating unit. Complete with dead rat. But enough about that.

Saturday I went to Wolong, 4 hours west of here, to see the giant panda reserve and research base they have there. And so, you'll find my flickr has 10 adorable pictures of young pandas gamboling and the like, around the research base. The scenery was beautiful, as Wolong is in the mountains, and halfway up they were winter wonderlands. We also saw wild monkeys on the way. Obviously wild, cause they were afraid of us instead of mugging us, like some places. Now, I don't eat meat, but for some reason it makes me even sadder than seeing animals killed to see the way some people treat wild animals, zoo animals too, throwing food at them, yelling at them like they're at the circus... I'm not pointing any fingers, but it's gross. Those pandas in the research base are going to grow up dysfunctional fo sho. (The next day).

I'm leaving you with a song for my friend Sal, about poo (not rat poo). Written by a camper named Charlie the summer of 2001. The summer at camp Sal and I (and Molly) saw like 35 moonsets together. A beautiful summer, a beautiful song (sort of).

QingCheng mountain after an all-nighter

I'm no longer in school and I don't have a crazy job (more like a manageable and often enjoyable job) yet I still pulled an all-nighter on Wednesday night! Why? Cause of a beautiful thing called unexpected freelance contracts. Translating. My brother Nicholas hooked me up with a contact, and so I spent all night translating a power-point presentation about how GrossCola-X can make lots of money if they market to kids on a cool new program on TVnetwork-Y. Sweet! Marketing is all happy bunnies and love! So after that all-nighter (I got it in, self-respect almost intact) I went straight over to QingCheng Mountain... you guessed it: the birthplace of Daoism. I went with Robbie, a 15-year old I'm tutoring. His dad drove us and paid for me, as a way of getting his son a full day of English for the price of a day trip.

First we went to Dujiangyan, the place where the mighty Min river was tamed. I adored the town, although perhaps it was partly first-time-out-of-the-city-in-3-months euphoria. Then to QingCheng Shan. Being winter, the mountain paths were almost deserted and so, more peaceful than usual. Not non-action peaceful, but still peaceful. We ascended the mountain, smelled the sickly-sweet incense, which smells good at first, but close-up, more like poison candy, saw a lot of Laotzu-esque monks, and temples, and it was quiet and great. See picture captions for more. Mountain: beautiful. The Dao De Ching: sometimes inscrutable, beautiful. Religious daoism: ritualicious.

Today's song is the only song I could think of about climbing a mountain and religion. "Abraham and Isaac" by Leonard Cohen. Or, if you're Muslim, "Abraham and Ishmael" (Eid mubarak, yo.) It's not Daoism, but if you know any songs about non-action and eternal changeableness, you're welcome to teach me them.

For Lizzie Loomis and West Virginia

I have lots of stories to tell, starting from Christmas. So I'll be posting again soon, but first, I wanted to put up a song for West Virginia. Most of the readers here are American, and I was thinking this morning about the Sago mine tragedy and the 12 miners and this is the song that came to me. It's "The Hills of West Virginia", by Phil Ochs.

Also relevant, Lizzie Loomis requested a long time ago that I play the hymn "Lead Kindly Light". It took me a long time to learn it, but here it is, too. For Lizzie and for Tallmansville, #2, "Lead, Kindly Light".


The pictures are mine. The seagull is from Lake Chapala in Mexico, and the tombstone from Quebec city. It's the oldest graveyard in the province, full of sailors and soldiers' wives who were often just in the New World for a season or two. It's downtown though, so people use it as a hangout, picnicking on the tombs and peeing on the trees. Lame